A new study indicated that intermittent fasting was not connected with weight loss during a 6-year period.
According to the findings, eating fewer, smaller meals may be more helpful for weight loss than restricting eating to a specific time window.
According to a study published Wednesday in the Journal of the American Heart Association, how much food you consume matters more than the timing of your meals when it comes to losing weight.
For six months, researchers at Johns Hopkins University asked 547 participants to record the number of their meals and when they ate on a mobile app. The scientists then used electronic health records to look at how much the participants weighed over the course of six years — five years before they started documenting their meals and six months after.
The study classified the recorded meals into three sizes: small meals had fewer than 500 calories, medium meals had 500 to 1,000 calories, and large meals had more than 1,000 calories. Overall, the people who ate the largest and medium meals gained weight over the course of six years, whereas those who ate fewer, smaller meals lost weight.
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This is consistent with the long-held and well-known norm that eating fewer calories promotes to weight loss.
The researchers discovered no link between weight change and the practice of restricting food consumption to a set time frame, sometimes known as intermittent fasting. They also discovered no link between weight change and the timing of a person's first meal after waking up or last meal or snack before going to bed.
"This study shows that changing your eating schedule will not prevent slow weight gain over many, many years — and that the most effective strategy is probably to really monitor how much you eat, and to eat fewer large meals and more small meals," said Dr. Wendy Bennett, a study author and associate professor at Johns Hopkins Medicine.
People of various weights participated in the study, including those who were overweight or had severe obesity. Overall, the observed weight increases were minor: persons who ate an extra daily meal gained less than one pound more per year on average than those who did not eat that extra meal.
"The effect is so minor that I wouldn't advise someone to change their behavior," said Courtney Peterson, an associate professor of nutrition sciences at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who was not involved in the study.
Bennett, on the other hand, claims that her research shows that restricting meal size can be successful for weight loss even after controlling for people's starting weights. (People who weigh more often have an easier difficulty acquiring or losing weight.)
She also mentioned that the average individual gains 1 or 2 pounds per year, which can add up to a significant amount of weight gain over time. Eating fewer large meals and more short meals, on the other hand, could "avoid the steady creep of weight gain," according to Bennett.
However, Peterson believes the study isn't a "slam dunk" when it comes to selecting the optimum weight loss technique.
Other research has revealed that the timing of a person's first meal of the day can be important: A study released in October indicated that eating earlier in the day may help people lose weight, maybe because it helps people burn calories or feel fuller throughout the day.
Bennett's study participants ate their meals across an 11.5-hour period, with their first meal less than two hours after getting up and their last meal around four hours before bed.
Researchers need to explicitly compare those who limit their food intake to a specified window to those who do not in a controlled trial to better examine whether intermittent fasting can help with weight loss, according to Peterson.
Previous research using a similar type of design yielded conflicting results. According to some research, fasting every other day or limiting calories to two days each week may assist obese persons to lose weight. Other research, however, has indicated that restricting meals to specific times of the day has no more effect on body weight than decreasing daily calorie consumption.
"I think time-restricted eating can be particularly useful when it comes to calorie restriction," Bennett said. "We already know that calorie restriction is the most effective weight-loss technique."
Peterson also underlined that a person's nutritional quality determines whether they gain or loses weight. Too much highly processed food, such as hot dogs, chips, or drinks, can contribute to weight gain, whereas diets rich in vegetables and whole grains can help with weight loss.
"Some of our best research in people implies that nutrition quality is probably more important than meal timing," Peterson added.
